YOU GOTTA LOVE THE DEEP STATE: A MEDITATION ON THE BOMBSHELL STORY FROM THE TIMES

Thirty years ago, I spent some time as the unpaid Executive Director of an organization named Harvard Radcliffe Alumni and Alumnae Against Apartheid, HRAAAA, or Hurrah as we liked to call it. Our goal, never realized of course, was to get Harvard to sell its shares in companies doing business in South Africa. This would have no material effect either on Harvard or on South Africa, but as I discovered in later years the psychological effect in South Africa of such divestment efforts was considerable and contributed to the eventual downfall of that system. The Harvard Development Office, the real beating heart of the institution, was, needless to say, a complicated bureaucratic operation staffed by large numbers of low level secretaries, fundraisers, researchers, and other faceless personnel, some of whom were secretly sympathetic to our cause. One of those nameless functionaries, one night, hit the “print” button on the old-fashioned computers then being used and printed out a complete list of all of Harvard’s prime donation targets, organized not alphabetically but in descending order of the amount of money Harvard calculated it could raise from each individual lifetime. The database included useful comments from the fundraisers which could be employed in tapping their prospects. My favorite listing was “Leonard Bernstein – probable lifetime donation $500,000 – will only speak to the president.” This experience did us no good since there was no way we could think of to use the information we had come by illicitly but it taught me something I had not learned from Max Weber about the way bureaucracies function.

 

This morning I read online a long detailed bombshell story from the New York Times on 20 years of Trump tax returns that they had obtained. Needless to say, the Times does not reveal its sources but I had the feeling that somewhere in the bowels of the IRS or some other bureaucratic institution was a sympathetic anti-Trumper who hit the download button and transferred all of those records onto a thumb drive which he or she brought home and sent on to the Times.

 

As many of you will already have learned even if you have not read the story, the big take away revelation is “$750.” That is the amount of personal income tax that Trump paid in 2016 and again in 2017. Trump also paid nothing at all in 10 of the 15 years before then but somehow the number “$750” carries more punch.  (In 2016, the Bidens paid $93,229.  If the Biden campaign can’t make something out of that, they should be convicted of political malpractice.)

 

What can I say about the entire detailed story which runs on for many pages? As I’m sure you have guessed, it reminds me of The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky’s great novel, as you all know, focuses on the doings of Feodor Dostoyevsky and his three sons, Alyosha, Dimitri, and Ivan. But – and I trust I am not ruining the novel for anyone by saying this – in the end it turns out to be the bastard son Smerdyakov who kills the old man. This sad sack of a character actually takes seriously what Ivan has learned from Western European intellectuals and is spouting here and there, but because he lacks soul, which Ivan possesses, he does not understand when to believe it and when to just wink at it.

 

Well, the New York Times story reveals that Trump has for decades made use of all the tax breaks and gimmicks that those big time Manhattan real estate moguls got written into the tax law, only like any other mob boss Trump stepped over the line again and again in ways that will leave them open to prosecution once he is finally out of the Oval Office. He really is the Smerdyakov of the New York real estate world.

 

Will this help in the effort to get rid of Trump? It can’t hurt. I know he isn’t going to do it, but I would love to see Biden start the debate Tuesday evening by simply intoning the words “seven hundred fifty dollars.”